Two girls from my Interrogation class - who’d never spoken to me - hurried over the minute we sat down.
“Hey hon, how are you doing?” Tansey Marchand is the daughter of a powerful Mob boss in New Orleans, and she adds a little extra sugar to her Southern accent. “It’s just so terrible, what happened. You can always talk to me if you need a sympathetic ear. Mateo and his whole slimy group are trash. Just trash.”
I stare at them, drinking my coffee. Why do people like to watch the grief of others so much? As if hearing all the ugly details of my pain and terror would keep it from happening to them? It’s why I refuse to talk about my parents to anyone but Lucca and Mariya.
“Thank you, Tansey,” Mariya said dryly, “you can move on now, your good deed is done for the day.”
Tansey stares at Mariya, eyes narrowed. “Well, bless your heart.” Tossing her curls over her shoulder, she flounces away, her friend in tow.
“You know she just told you to go fuck yourself, right?” Konstantin said gleefully. “For a Southern girl, that’s the worst thing she could ever say to you.”
“It definitely seemed like the message based on her expression,” she snickers.
“That didn’t take long to make the rounds, did it?” I ask, rubbing my eyes.
Lucca kisses the top of my head. “They don’t matter. Ignore them.”
It was a week before I saw Mateo again.
“What is that fucker still doing on campus!” hissed Camilla. “I’m going to stab him in the throat with my pen!”
Just the sight of him makes my stomach churn violently, and I look down at my white-knuckle grip on my book bag. “I thought he left the school with the other three.”
Athena caught up with us. “He should have, the little prick. But apparently, his father insisted he stay and finish the year since he’d already taken his punishment. His dad’s a real bástardos, too.”
Camilla steps closer to me as he approaches us, but she doesn’t need to worry. Mateo turns when he spots us and goes the other way. He looks pale, nasty like he hasn’t showered. As I glance down at his right hand, I drop my bag.
There isn’t one. A hand. Just a bandaged stump.
“I’m going to be sick,” I whisper.
“Don’t you dare,” Athena says, linking her arm with mine for the first time ever. “He got exactly what he deserved.”
With Mateo keeping away from me, life at the Academy settled into something that perhaps wasn’t perfect, though it was close. There was so much laughter and happiness in the moments spent with our group - the first people ever that I could confidently say were my true friends - and with Lucca.
He was very careful to not touch me in any way that could be considered sexual, though I spent nearly every night with him. This went on for over a week before I straddled him in bed - naked - and told him no one was getting any sleep until he made me come.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Hmmm?” I mumble, lying on top of him and playing with his hair.
“Did you tell your bodyguard about the attack? Your brothers?” Lucca strokes his calloused fingertips down my arm.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Tell me why,” he said, concerned. “Don’t you think this is something they need to know? The Costa Mafia isn’t one of the most powerful ones in Europe, but they make up for it by being the most evil.”
Frowning, I roll off him, sitting up. “I haven’t considered the repercussions, damn it. I didn’t tell Lev because…” I waved my hands, trying to shape my emotions into words. “Lev’s taken care of me for half my life. He came at a very bad time for me, and he helped me cope. I felt safe with him. If he finds out this happened while he’s been rotting away in town not ten minutes from here, it would…” Shaking my head, “It would kill him. He’s risked his life so many times to protect me. If I tell my brothers, they’ll completely lose it. I have no idea what they would do but it would take their attention away from this threat that’s trying to destroy our Bratva.”
Lucca sits up, pulling me onto his lap, wrapping his arms around me. “What happened back then? What did he help you with?” His fingers slide down my back, lightly touching my thick, ugly scar. “Does it have something to do with this?”
I try to pull away, but he keeps his arms around me and he’s warm and I rest my cheek against his lovely, sculpted chest so that I don’t have to look at him.
“I was kidnapped when I was ten. My bodyguard was an older soldier who was furious about getting assigned to me. He felt like it was demeaning, I suspect, like he was too old to handle anything that would bring him more attention or praise.
“So, it was easy for the men to take me. Albanians. They were trying to get a foothold in Canada and they thought I was an easy way to make the Aslanov Bratva lose face. ‘Look, they can’t even keep track of their little girl!’”
He’s listening carefully, rubbing his hands on my back. “You must have been terrified. Only ten years old.”
“My captors told me that they would start cutting off pieces of me to send to my father,” I said, “I was lucky, though. My brothers tracked them down pretty quickly, just a couple of days later. I was chained in a warehouse, in the basement. When the Albanian guarding me realized they’d broken in and killed everyone, he stabbed me in the back. He was aiming up, trying to hit my heart but the blade bounced off a rib. It’s an ugly scar.”
“It’s beautiful,” he insists, leaning down to press his lips against it. “It’s beautiful because it shows you were strong enough to survive.”
“I didn’t feel very strong,” I said. “My mother wanted to pretend it didn’t happen, like it would just… go away if we never talked about it. I couldn’t sleep, I’d wake up screaming because I was so scared the men would come back. Roman sent Lev from Moscow to be my new bodyguard. He’s the one who taught me to breathe through panic attacks, he started training me in self-defense but my mother put a stop to that. She said it was unladylike, but I suspect she hated seeing me train because it reminded her that I could be kidnapped again.”
Lucca cups my face in his hands, kissing my forehead, each cheekbone, and then my lips. “You are strong. Courageous. Thank you for telling me, piccolo bacio, my little kiss.”
Lucca…
Late December…
It’s been so long since I’ve been happy - truly happy - that I’ve forgotten how effortless it is. No paranoia about whether it’s real, no anticipation of the one-two punch sure to come for having the audacity to feel this way. The anxiety that it’s going to be taken away is absent when it comes to Tatiana.
I don’t know if it’s because she’s been sheltered so much, but she doesn’t have the artifice, the cynicism that most women in our world do. When I walk into a room, she lights up, genuinely happy to see me and not afraid to show it.
Tatiana and Mariya are sitting on our couch, laughing over something they’re looking at on Tati’s illegal laptop.
“What’s making you laugh?” I ask, dropping a kiss on her shoulder. “Or do I really not want to know?”
“Oh, Mariya’s showing me a hairstyle she wants to wear for the Christmas party.” She turns the screen toward me and I try to disguise my laugh as a cough.
“I see. It’s very… complicated.” It’s a horrible mix of braids, the fabric things girls put in their hair - scrunchies? - and fake flowers.
“Kon insisted that we needed to go to the party together to ‘keep up appearances,’” Mariya said, making a mocking quote sign with two fingers. “So, I want to look my best.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I agree, straight-faced. “Kon’s not… uh, smooth when it comes to you. But I promise his heart is in the right place.”